By Tom Wozniak, Chief Operating Officer – published on Only Influencers on 3/24/24

In the email industry, we have a lot of terms we use regularly. Deliverability, Open Rate, Inbox, Subject Line, Friendly From, Call-to-Action, etc. For the most part, we all have a consistent shared definition of what these terms mean. But there is one commonly used email term where the definition can vary quite a bit depending on who you speak with. SPAM.

This topic came up in a recent webinar I participated in with ZeroBounce and their COO Brian Minnick. We discussed the definition of spam and how it can differ from one person to the next among consumers and even in the email industry. That conversation inspired me to write this article and delve a little deeper into the term and parts of the definition that are fairly well-shared and others not so much.

First, a little history. Because everyone loves history lessons. While the term is almost ubiquitous in email today, it first came up in a USENET post from 1993, when ‘spam’ was used to describe a software bug that caused a few hundred messages to be sent to the newsgroup. It’s likely the use of the term was inspired by a Monty Python sketch from 1970 where the comedy troupe used it in a repetitive and extremely annoying way (spam, spam, spam, spam, and so on) – so the idea that spam was something annoying that kept on repeating or happening over and over.

The name clearly stuck and eventually became synonymous with various types of unwanted and/or mass messages sent across various mediums, including email. Eventually, its place in email marketing was cemented with the passing of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Today, we also see it regularly applied to SMS marketing, telemarketing, and social media.

How The Law Defines Spam

Technically, ‘spam’ isn’t a legal term, but the CAN-SPAM Act addresses “unsolicited commercial email.” So, that’s at least a reasonable starting point.

How Google Defines Spam

Hitting up our friendly neighborhood search engine, the AI overview results for “what is spam email?” tells us that…

“A ‘spam email’ is an unsolicited and unwanted email, typically sent in bulk to a large number of recipients, often containing commercial advertising for products or services that the recipient did not request or consent to receive.”

That certainly hits a lot of the high points, but it also leaves some room for interpretation since it uses words like “typically” and “often” as qualifiers. It also doesn’t specifically include several types of email content that many people would agree falls under the definition of spam (like malware, phishing, etc.).

How the Email Industry Defines Spam

Here’s where things start to get interesting. While there are a lot of commonalities in how different email marketing pros define the term, there isn’t a consensus. Here are a few ways (often in combination) that email industry pros define spam.

Unsolicited Email – For some people in the email industry, any unsolicited email constitutes spam. But even this is a bit open to interpretation. What about transactional emails or other business-related emails that might be sent to a current customer, when they may not have specifically signed up for it? How about a 1-to-1 email sent by one individual to another? That could be a cold sales email (spam?) or just an un-asked-for email from an acquaintance talking about politics. And, speaking of politics, what about the unsolicited political email that shows up in your inbox leading up to an election? Spam or not spam? 

Bulk Email – This is also often included in definitions of spam. How many email addresses have to be on a list for it to be a ‘bulk’ email campaign? With personalization and various sending algorithms involving time zones and recipient ESPs, is it still ‘bulk email’ if it is sent over a span of 24 hours and every email is highly personalized with varied content? Newsletters would seem to qualify as bulk email, but they tend not to carry negative connotations just from the fact they are sent to a lot of recipients. 

Commercial/Marketing Email – The CAN-SPAM Act is clear that it covers emails that are ‘commercial messages’ which we generally call marketing or advertising emails. So, if an email has the goal of selling a product or service, does that make it spam? What if recipients signed up to receive special offers from the advertiser via email? Political email is not considered commercial email, as defined by CAN-SPAM, but it can certainly leverage similar approaches to content as marketing emails do.

Malicious Email (Phishing, Malware, etc.) – This might actually be the single qualification that will automatically define an email as spam for all email industry professionals. Even if a recipient signed up to receive an email like this (possibly due to being misled), just about every email professional and consumer alike would call it spam.

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Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications as the COO for OPTIZMO Technologies.